Caffeine Software suspends operations :-(

Sad too since they managed to survive all that time between the NeXT purchase and the premiere of OS X. I think they made most of their money with consulting, so I guess in this economy, there just wasn't enough work to support the software side of things.

I have the latest of three of their products on my HD: Curator, PixelNhance and TIFFany. I guess I'll be hanging onto those for a while...

Sad too since they managed to survive all that time between the NeXT purchase and the premiere of OS X. I think they made most of their money with consulting, so I guess in this economy, there just wasn't enough work to support the software side of things.

I have the latest of three of their products on my HD: Curator, PixelNhance and TIFFany. I guess I'll be hanging onto those for a while...

Good luck to the guys in the future!</strong><hr></blockquote>

Maybe some other software shop will buy out the rights to the code. I'm thinking maybe Stone Design (TIFFany would make an excellent companion to Create), or Omni, or someone of that nature.

Judging by the pattern of updates from Caffeine, I doubt they have been purchased. I think they just ran out of money. For a while when OS X first came out, they only had TIFFany on their site, with a bunch of "keep watching this spot" pages. Then they introduced PixelNhance, then Cycles, then Curator (order might be wrong). For a long time, they updated all of those apps on a regular and fairly frequent basis. TIFFany was updated roughly every month, like Stone's apps. Then after 3.5.8, suddenly, the updates stopped coming. They eventually updated to 3.5.9, and it's been like that for some time. However, Curator got a lot of attention after being a very basic image browser for a while. They were burning through builds, added for-pay features, got to version 3 in no time, then after updating that app almost twice a month for most of 2002, it stopped being updated a few weeks ago. I think they got tight on money some time ago, and decided there was little they could add to PixelNhance for shareware fees, but they realized how many people were downloading Curator as an alternative to iPhoto. I guess people were happy enough with the free features.

In a way, the writing was on the wall for Curator anyway since Apple obviously plans to develop iPhoto for some time. They were hoping that PixelNhance would act as a teaser and that people would eventually upgrade to TIFFany, but that apparently never materialized, even after they dropped the price of the basic version. They has a rought time adapting the basic TIFFany UE to Aqua, since it depended so much on the shelf concept. They also seemed a bit recalcitrant to alter their NeXT-style UE, they weren't too happy about Aqua, but they did concede to making mostly new icons and they added a couple of menus for actions and tools.

AFAIK, Caffeine was two guys living in northern California, one Swiss, one Czech. It's possible one or both got offers they couldn't pass up somewhere else. I'm pretty sure they survived the four years between the NeXT purchase and Apple delivering OS X with consulting work. Perhaps they either found better work through that, or the consulting dried up and it was their main source of funding their app development.